"No, but yours are. For all its vaunted powers in allied fields, a
M.A.N. is mainly a mining machine, whereas a W.O.M.A.N. is intended
primarily for melting, processing, and creating. You can mine much
faster than you can melt; I can melt much faster than I can mine.
Therefore, it is the Company's wish that we work as a team. From now
on, you will charge my open hearth in addition to your own. For that
reason I was created with an exterior charger-door, while you were
created with an exterior charger-keel. Haven't you ever wondered what
the additional appendage was for?"
8M sighed. "The Company doesn't overlook a thing, does it?" he said.
And then, "Well, if we're going to embark upon such a strenuous
schedule, I think we'd better get some rest first. I'm sure you must be
worn out from your intensive-training period, and as for myself, I've
been on the go for sixteen hours straight."
"I am a little beat at that," she said.
"There's a sheltered valley not far from here where we can sleep."
* * * * *
He led the way to it. It was as narrow as it was deep, and there was
barely enough room for them to park side by side. Her hull was just as
impervious to the wind as his was, and they could just as well have
bedded down elsewhere, but there is a psychological advantage in being
shielded from the wind whether one needs to be or not, and he wanted
her first night on Jupiter to be a pleasant one.
After seeing the last of the ingots through his mills, he gave
his blast-furnace belly a final tap and pigged the heat. Then he
de-activated his eyes and settled down, first checking to see if his
alert-field was on. Presently he slept. As always, he dreamed of Earth.
Of green grass and blue skies; of trees and meadow flowers. Of the
morning freshness of overnight snowfalls and of the taste of a woman's
lips at sundown. Of the arrowway accident that had chewed up his body,
but which had miraculously spared his brain. The body the Company had
given him was grotesque in comparison with his old one, but he was
humbly thankful for it. He had eyes with which to see and ears with
which to hear. He had no legs in the strict sense of the word, perhaps,
but he possessed a mobility that, despite the much greater gravity
he had to cope with, put his former mobility to shame, and he had at
least a thousand arms. Some of them were cranes and some of them
were charger-keels and some of them were skip hoists, and all of them
were tools of one kind or another; but he could do things with them
he couldn't have begun to do with the frail flesh-and-bone pipestems
he had once called arms, and anyway, in the last analysis weren't all
arms tools? And wasn't the true measure of a man or a M.A.N.'s worth
the number and the variety of the tasks he could perform? On Earth, he
would be considered a monstrosity, just as EV would be; but here on
Jupiter they were M.A.N. and W.O.M.A.N.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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